Gilgamesh is a Babylonian epic, recorded in Akkadian on a number of ancient tablets. Gilgamesh is thought to have lived around 2,800 – 2,500 BCE[1], and most of the tablets, telling the standard version of the story, are thought to date from the seventh century BCE. Stephanie Dalley also gives an earlier version in her book, called the Old Babylonian Version, dating to around the early second millennium[2]. There are… Read more
Diodorus Siculus This is the final blogpost that was inspired by my reading of Diodorus’s Library[1] for the Kosmos Society Book Club in 2023. Diodorus wrote about the actions of Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE, and about the wars of succession that took place after the death of Alexander. Earlier blogposts looked at the general social and religious contexts at the time,… Read more
This is the third blogpost in the series looking at the women that Diodorus wrote about, following our reading of the history of Alexander the Great in Diodorus’s Library[1] for the Kosmos Society Book Club in the summer of 2023. I extended my reading to Plutarch[2] and Arrian[3] to get a wider picture of Alexander’s life. The first blogpost described some of the social and religious contexts of the time,… Read more
During the summer of 2023 the Kosmos book club read Chapter 17 of Diodorus Siculus’s Library[1], which described the career of Alexander the Great. I began to research more widely the women mentioned in the account, which involved researching Alexander’s family, background and contexts. Plutarch was also a useful source for this[2]. The first blogpost told of the sources and methodology I used and described some of the social and… Read more
This series of blogposts originated in the Kosmos Society’s Book Club reading, in the summer of 2023, of Diodorus Siculus’ Library, Book 17, which concerns the campaigns of Alexander the Great[1] in the fourth century BCE. As we read, it became evident that more contextual material was available in Books 16, 18, 19 and 20 of the Library, and also in the works of Plutarch[2] and Arrian[3]. Wikipedia dates Diodorus… Read more